Leader-Sheep

In 1971 the French defence minister Michel Debré announced that the military camp on the Larzac plateau would be expanded. The farmers there swore an oath never to give up their land and began a resistance that lasted a decade. Facing the army and the gendarmes day after day, they reached for invention rather than weapons, hundreds of Larzac committees sprang up across France, and in 1981 they won. Christian Rouaud tells it in 2010 through nine people who were there, letting the story arrive as memory rather than argument. The film won the César for best documentary in 2012. Its international title, Leadersheep, is a pun sitting between the bellwether and the leader.